As a sophomore in Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars undergraduate program, I first crossed paths with Stephen Dixon.
From the moment I remember, his small, intimate class met in the basement of Gilman Hall, where ink-stained pockets and the way he paced the room while discussing fiction in a soft, almost soporific cadence stood out. In his gentle, understated manner, he urged us to uncover the tenderness embedded in ordinary life.
Later that year, I queued up for a signed copy of his new book—End of I, published by McSweeney’s—at Barnes & Noble, which had just opened in the dorm building across from the campus’s main entrance. I reminded him of my name so he could personalize the book (I hadn’t left much of an impression on him as a student). A year or so afterward, Professor Dixon retired from nearly three decades of teaching at JHU.
Soon after, overwhelmed with tears and anxiety as a senior in my final semester, I barged into the office of my poetry professor, Mary Jo Salter, and begged for guidance about what to do with a degree that my pre-med friends affectionately called “pre-unemployment.” She offered a simple path: “Find a publishing house.” I recall replying, somewhat incredulously, “What’s that?”
Remarkably, about a year after graduation I managed to squeeze into a publicity assistant role within the Knopf Doubleday group of Random House (today part of Penguin Random House). A few years later, almost as astonishingly, Stephen Dixon and I became pen pals.
I don’t remember exactly how it began—I suspect I asked another JHU professor for his email to tell him how much his work and that class had meant to me—but for years we remained in regular email contact about life, work, and his writing, which continued to pour out of him until the very end.
Stephen Dixon’s prose is as ordinary and intimate as reading someone’s shopping list. To me, that’s the beauty in it.
Professor Dixon’s emails were just like his fiction writing—intimate and full of quotidian details. He referred to himself as “a fussbudget worrywart,” he gleefully told me that his grandson’s sonogram photo looked “like a bust carved from marble by Michelangelo,” and he signed off messages with lines such as: “The plumber just arrived so I’ve got to go.”
And every few months, a bursting FedEx envelope from Baltimore would appear at my desk at PRH containing Professor Dixon’s typewritten chunks of new and unpublished writing. While I told him that, as a lowly publicist, I wasn’t in the position to make decisions about what gets published, he still seemed happy enough to share his new work with me, which was an honor.
I once heard someone say that if Elizabeth Strout wrote a shopping list she would buy it; I, a devoted Strout fan, have shamelessly borrowed that line whenever I talk about my favorite authors.
In many ways, Stephen Dixon’s prose is as ordinary and intimate as reading someone’s shopping list. To me, that’s the beauty in it. His stream of consciousness spotlighted, as if something exquisite and worthy of attention, every minor detail in a human life—from the simple pleasure of dining at a favorite local restaurant to the pangs of caring for an ailing loved one, the constant fear of being a parent, and life’s sudden interruptions.
A personal favorite Stephen Dixon story is “Flying,” in which a father realizes that he and his daughter are [literally] flying through the air—the father has no plan for how to land them, but doesn’t want to worry the daughter by admitting to his lack of control over the situation. I was many years from becoming a parent when I first read this story, but loved it even then. Dixon has this distinct way of portraying universally human moments, and I loved the years I spent toggling between reading his published and unpublished works, and receiving his emails.
By the fall of 2019, I hadn’t heard from Professor Dixon in a while. Then I received an email from his daughters, who told me that he was in hospice. They offered for me to send him a message if I wanted to. It was another intimate honor for which, to this day, I am very grateful.
For those who haven’t yet discovered Stephen Dixon’s towering trove of writing, I hope they will now with McSweeney’s upcoming publication of two of his previously unpublished works as well as the re-publication of acclaimed novels and stories. His work is a beautiful, and urgent, reminder of the poignancy of life’s smallest moments.
______________________________
I., End of I., and Goodbye to Goodbye by Stephen Dixon are available from McSweeney’s.
